Registration….

Last week we had the joy of experiencing registering for classes the UPLB way. Most students enroll using an online program similar to what MSU uses, but as exchange students, we had a whole different system known as “pre-rogging,” short for prerogative. In this system, we had to find each professor and ask them to let us take their class. This could be done the day before classes started or throughout the first week of class. As you can imagine, this was mildly challenging, because professors aren’t required to be in their offices, or anywhere on campus for that matter, during the first week. Thankfully, the Office of International Linkages assigned us a UPLB student who was familiar with campus to help us out. We heard horror stories from other students about professors making them sing and dance and do other silly things before they were allowed into the class, but thankfully we weren’t asked much more than our background in the topic. As frustrated as RJ and I were with the process, the other MSU students encountered a great deal more hurdles than we did. We were done for the day around 10:30AM, but the others didn’t finish until about 3PM!! 

After the first day of registration, we only had 6 credits, so the next day we went out to try again. Luckily, things went pretty smoothly and we were able to get 12 credits of classes we wanted/needed to take. We were so excited to be finished, we turned our forms into the registrar’s office and went on our merry way. Later that night, we realized we had been planning to take PE classes just for fun. This made our registration process a lot more hectic, because we had already finalized our schedules with the registrar’s office. Thankfully, we met Luis, a chemical engineering student who studied at MSU for a semester, who helped us out here. In the end, RJ signed up for table tennis and archery, and I just signed up for archery.

I was soo excited to get into the archery class! I have always wanted to learn how to shoot a bow and arrow!  The class was full, but the professor was really nice, and offered to come an hour early to teach us. There are a handful of students that will be joining us for the early class, and I actually think it will be better since it is a smaller class, so we don’t have to wait as long to shoot. I think the fact that we are American helped us out a bit, because he said no to a lot of students that wanted to come early—he said he spent a summer in Wisconsin and he was asking me a bunch of questions about Michigan and what not. All in all, registration was a pain, but I am happy with my classes and pretty excited for some of them!! (If you are curious, I am taking Transportation Engineering, Foundation Engineering, Philippine History, Philippine Art and Society, and Archery J).